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Main Index
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| | | Book Name: Yoga - The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 3 | Previous Next | |
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and more subtle. For example, you can meditate on a rock, or you can meditate on a flower, or you can meditate on the fragrance of the flower, or you can meditate on the meditator. And then things go subtle and subtle and subtle and subtle. For example, you can meditate on the sound aum. The first meditation is to say it loudly so it resounds all around you. It becomes a temple of sound all around you: aum, aum, aum. You create vibrations all around you -- gross, the first step. Then you close your mouth. Now you don't say it loudly. Inside you say, aum, aum, aum. Lips are not allowed to move, not even the tongue. Without the tongue and without the lips you say, aum. Now you create an inner atmosphere, inner climate of aum. The object has become subtle. Then the third step: you don't even recite it, you simply listen to it. You change the position -- from the doer, you move to a passivity of a listener. In the third state you don't pronounce the aum inside also. You simply sit and you hear the sound. It comes because it is there. You are not silent; that's why you cannot hear it.
Aum is not a word of any human language. It doesn't mean anything. That's why Hindus don't write it in the usual alphabetical order. No, they have made a separate form for it just to distinguish it, that this is not part of the alphabet. It exists on its own, separate, and it means nothing. It is not a word of human language. It is the sound of the very existence itself; the sound of the soundless, the sound of the silence. When everything is silent then it is heard. So you become the hearer. It goes on and on, more and more subtle. And in the fourth stage you simply forget about everything: the doer, and the hearer, and the sound -- everything. In the fourth stage there is nothing.
You must have seen ten oxherding pictures of Zen. In the first picture a man is looking for his ox -- the ox has gone somewhere in the wild forest, no sign, no footprints -- just looking all around, trees and trees and trees. In the second picture he looks happier -- footprints have been found. In the third he seems a little bewildered -- just the back of the ox is seen near a tree, but difficult
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